Everybody who reads this is very likely a veteran of many lifetimes spent on this planet, the lunatic asylum of the universe. All of us have been here together many times in various combinations and sub groups. You may have realized that this time we are honoring a contract to be here on Earth in the same generation during a time of apparent danger to the planet in order to hear something very important about our spiritual quest and our destiny. There are a few things that we must be absolutely clear about before even beginning this study, otherwise we can get diverted from the path as we have all been diverted many times over the aeons. It only takes a little attention to basics to introduce us to the real game of life that is being played, and the rules behind it. We learn to see through the mundane façade by knowing the basics. Here they are.

We have all incarnated many times AS a person. This is the mundane and ordinary perspective. But we are also THAT which incarnates. There is something that animates this body, gives it life and thoughts and thinks through this body using its five input systems. It uses the body to move around the planet like a Mars rover camera uses its rover body to move the camera around the planet. When the karma of the body is over then THAT leaves the body, which obeys the law of Conservation of Energy and dissolves into its constituent atoms and molecules and is reassembled in some other forms. The disassembled body may have its constituent atoms and molecules placed into minerals, plants or animals, or even other human bodies. The constituents are impersonal components of a vehicle, not in any way the person, or the person’s mind.

So we are not only incarnating as a particular person for this round of the game, we are involved in a series of incarnations and the current one is the last of an ongoing series. From the point of view of star and planet time this person is very short lived. Many of us identify very strongly with this current incarnation, but in the last incarnation we identified just as strongly with that one, as another person.

The most useful perspective with which you can approach the study of what is really going on is that you haven’t ever been this person or that person. You are THAT which has experienced life from the perspective of many human beings. The current life is just one of a great series of human lives and you are no more this current person than you were any of the myriads of others which THAT has energized over the aeons.

As you moved from one incarnation to another the reflection you saw in the mirror changed every time. Next time, if there is a next time, you will see yet another. But what didn’t change was what was looking at the different reflections. That in you which is now aware of your Being is the same Awareness that was there every lifetime no matter what.

The seeds of your karma are carried in the subtle body. This is the body that goes from one incarnation to another. It carries with it the blueprint of the next incarnation when it leaves the current incarnation at the transition called death on this side of the curtain and birth on the other side. So get this important point clear:

The physical body is merely an instrument used by the subtle body to experience its karma. Unfinished karma is what produces the body, circumstances and parents of the next incarnation. You are constructing the next one right now with every thought and deed.

There is not a single good reason to identify with this physical body. It’s just a space suit made from the elements of the current planet, vitalized by the subtle energy in the air, variously called Prana, Chi, Ki, Urthin and the like, and temporarily controlled by the subtle body.

You can get a good perspective on the matter by looking at it this way…A complete incarnation in the body of a person is like one day in the life of the subtle body. So this life is no big deal in the scheme of things. The subtle body goes from incarnation to incarnation, in various physical bodies, each one starting where the other left off as far as unfinished lessons are concerned. And everyone reading this has had hundreds of incarnations.

We live more than one life simultaneously. The physical life is the shortest of our existences that we experience. Between incarnations life goes on in the subtle body. Sometimes we experience it in dreams. Here is another concept to make things clear

About 98% of our lives are actually spent in the subtle realms. Most humans don’t notice that because they are fixated on the 2% of the dream of the daily physical world.

So, for the waking up work just hang on to the notion that the physical body so many people think they are is in fact just a space suit that the subtle body uses to experience planet Earth and its various laws of existence. We have done this hundreds of times and here we all are again, indestructible as ever.

In one society I belonged to a standard mantra was “I am immortal, invulnerable and cannot be harmed.” You might consider that because it is completely true. But the I is not the personality. It is the I of the little prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Check my posting Healing in the Now December 2, 2006,for more details about the difference between the I and the me.

Visualizers may find this a useful approach. You go to see a movie. Watch it through and then go home. You didn’t experience death. That’s like your life. From the point of view of the physical body death may seem pretty traumatic. From the point of view of the subtle body it’s just like waking out of a dream, or leaving the theatre at the end of the movie. You do this every day and don’t get traumatized every time you wake up.

So, just realize for this work that you woke from the private dream into a public dream, arranged for your benefit by the subtle body and also for the benefit of the great game we have been playing for aeons, on the board of time and space and in the world of karma. The Indians call it Leela, the game of god.

There are some laws that we follow in this game of Leela. The most important law is this: Our own Consciousness contains all the power that we, in error, give to circumstances and other people. And the corollary from the Pattern on the Trestleboard All the Power that ever was or will be is here now.

Now that inner Consciousness is the Self with a capital S, not the ego self with a lower case s. We all share the same Self simultaneously. My inner Self isn’t just similar to yours, it is identical. The secret of understanding occult matters is the constant experience, the gnosis, that there is only One Consciousness.

There are millions of different minds and egos using the laws of the mind to make their own individual views of the current universe. But the actual Perceiver of everything is the same in everybody. The nature of anything perceived is the same for everybody, but every person sees it from a different perspective related to their background, conditioning and understanding. That which sees is the same in all. That which is seen is the same for all. But the perspective of each person is created by the individual mind and is different. And the different perspectives depend tremendously on the habitual attitudes the individual has developed.

The enlightened ones can say, “My Self is the Self of all beings. The Universe is a mental construct. Only the Self is Real. Only the Real is Eternal.” All of these are from Indian scriptures. They are statements of one who knows, not one who believes what others have said. Whichever of these statements resonates within you is connecting to the immortal part of you…the Eternal Witness.

For your waking up work to achieve its highest level you must realize that all outward appearances are only mental constructs externalized and believed. I say to all my conferees…”What you think is what you see, and what you see is what you get.” We cannot think one thing and experience another. Our innermost Self is the creative awareness of the universe.

Anything the mind accepts as true becomes a law in the subconscious and manifests in the world of the one who accepted it, sometimes as a vulnerable child in a moment of emotional stress. But once put in it is always there as a law, unless work is done deliberately and consciously to alter it.

I tell all my conferees the story of how Magellan and Captain Cook both landed on islands in their long boats and were met by natives with perfect physical vision who were unable to see the great ships anchored a hundred yards off shore. Their minds just knew that dugout canoes that big could not exist. You, reading this are quite likely to be able to see things that many others don’t, because they have programming that denies the existence of some phenomena and people like us have either gotten rid of it, or never had it. Psychics and materialists are the obvious example. Brilliantly gifted men laugh at those with less left brained education who are aware of things that the brilliant ones can’t see or hear or believe to exist.

A modern example has happened since the cleaning of the painting The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. For centuries people have been brought up on the edited versions of the words of the Last Supper story in the New Testament. They just knew, that the painting therefore was of Jesus and his twelve disciples. Those who knew that saw that. It’s a psychological trick of the great joker Leonardo who knew exactly what would happen and found ways to put these little jokes in his pictures to insert his own beliefs invisibly into the generally accepted ones.

But look at any reproduction of the cleaned picture. The disciple in the place of honor at the right hand of Jesus is a woman. She has small hands, traces of breasts in the folds of the dress, red hair and a beautiful face. It is Mary Magdalene about whom a great deal of truth is now being revealed, much to my delight, and mainly because of two popular books… Holy Blood, Holy Grail l by Baigent and Leigh and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. And I had these same views many decades ago, like many pagans, and wrote about them myself in the book Who was Jesus Really?

But millions have looked at the picture over the centuries without noticing it. This is an example of skitoma, a new Scrabble word for you. It means the invisibility of some contexts because of previous conditioning. Your life is full of skitoma. Attention on what seems to be happening, knowing you are not the body, helps eliminate it.

Every contemporary of Leonardo who wrote about him commented on his amazing abilities and his extraordinary physical beauty. As a young man he turned heads wherever he walked. And he used his own face as a model for two of the faces in that famous picture: Mary and Jesus. And he painted them as Yin and Yang, the two polarities. His other famous picture the Mona Lisa has also been noted because the proportions of that famous face are exactly the proportions of the face of the artist.

Leonardo was apparently one of those who knew about the total equality of the sexes that existed in the original teachings and practices of the original group of Nazoreans and he was pointing this out in a subtle way to the Church that had destroyed that equality and feminine influence by any and every means available, including murder.

And for those who already know some Egyptian stuff…the masculine god of fertility was AMON and the Egyptian goddess Isis was written in Florence as L’ISA. It doesn’t take rocket science intelligence to get from AMON L’ISA to MONA LISA. Leonardo was a great joker, as well as a very courageous man.

Michelangelo did a similar thing with his amazing statue of David, using a huge block of marble rejected by some of the greatest artists of the era, including Leonardo. Everyone was so over-awed by the supernatural skill of the sculpting that nobody seemed to notice that David, the soon to be king of the Jews was not circumcised.

Every Jewish male is circumcised around the eighth day of life because the ancient contract the Jews made with Yahweh. The sculptor knew that. Every educated person in Florence knew that. Nobody apparently noticed it or mentioned it. Sleight of hand with tons of marble.

I have reasons for mentioning this focus on Mary Magdelene. She, to a believer in the anti feminist propaganda of the Church was like the ships of Magellan and Cook to the natives. In the picture she was psychologically invisible. And we ALL have invisible ships in our harbors because of our conditioning. Some are treasure ships and others ought to be sunk for our health’s sake. But becoming conscious of them is essential to our freedom. Many of them are options unperceived because of skitoma, mental programming.

It takes hard work and practice to realize that a certain thing is actually true when all the reports of the senses deny it because of previous programming. Nothing external to us creates anything. If we are conscious of something, then it is. That’s the whole story of some people’s lives.

We constantly see people fighting against circumstances that are entirely of their own making, reflections of their attitudes in the mirror of the world. If you don’t like your expression in the mirror you change your expression, you don’t fight the mirror.

This is the real meaning of the saying of Jesus that is so hard for the literal minded. He said, “To he that hath shall be given, and from he that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.” The Adept of Bethany was talking about the law we have just examined. Look at a common example and see how true it is. Look at poverty and riches.

The rich man never even bothers to think about his basic needs being met. He just gets richer. He focuses on the growth of his investments or the next thing to buy. Never on being sure of the basic necessities of life.

The man in poverty consciousness is always focused on the next bill, or the possibility that he will be going into debt. He thinks of not having enough at the end of the month. He concentrates on debt. He gets even poorer.

In every area of life this law applies perfectly. It is an example of perfect justice, not injustice. The only problems in life are caused by ignorance of the laws, not sin. Any problem lives on as long as we are conscious of it. We have to learn to claim our freedom even over the obstacles of the senses reporting something else.

Knowing where we come from as human beings is a good step in the direction of seeing things in the right perspective. It is indeed only a first step, but without it we can go in millions of wrong directions, and have done in many lives.

So bear these last few items in mind as principles. If you have read the works of Zecharia Sitchin you already know about the story of the creation of humans like us, with genetic equipment that no other animal possesses. It is this equipment that gives us the possibility of finding the secret of the game we all play, consciously as initiates, or unconsciously as the mundane.

Just reading this little bit of material regularly will begin to weaken various skitomas in your life. It is written at several different levels like many occult instructions. You can only get to level three by going through levels one and two. Re-reading is the only way to do this. I read one page in an old alchemy book, Turba Philosophorum every day for years before I got through all the levels. Doing it with the right material is a splendid spiritual discipline.

Happy Trails,

Douglas